How to Manage Drivers for a Display Device

How to Manage Drivers for a Display Device

Here is how to enable and disable drivers for a given display device on your shop floor.

This article explains how to manage drivers for a given display device through the Shop Floor page of your Factory instance.

Why do I need to manage Drivers?

Drivers are small pieces of code included in your Tulip Player that allow the display device running apps on Player to communicate with 3rd party devices such as barcode scanners, foot pedals, cameras, and much more.

A driver needs to be "enabled" to allow the app on Player to communicate with a 3rd party device.

It is necessary to configure your Player to only enable drivers for devices that you are currently using in order to preserve performance.

Configuring Drivers from the Factory Shop Floor

To configure drivers for a specific Player, open the Factory instance to which the Player is connected.

1. From the home page, select “Shop Floor” and its dropdown item “Stations”.

2. Click on the active “Display Device”.

3. Click the “Configure Drivers” button.

4. From the “Driver Configuration” page, select the drivers you wish to either enable or disable.

5. Flip switch to the right on each desired driver to turn them on, or flip to the left to turn them off.

6. Click “Save” to confirm your configuration and to propagate these changes to the Player.

7. On Player, click “Confirm” on the “Reload App?” pop-up to propagate the changes that enabling the driver(s) could have on the running app.

While most drivers on Player can only be turned on and off, some drivers have more advanced configuration options.

One specific example is the “USB-BARCODE” driver, which allows you to add and remove custom devices to be associated with the driver itself. Here is an example of a barcode scanner being added to the “USB-BARCODE” driver configuration with a name, a product ID (PID) number, and a vendor ID (VID) number: